


Wild and Wired

by lettered



Series: Wild and Wired [1]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: M/M, Reference to past underage sex, reference to real life celebrities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 06:57:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17955749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettered/pseuds/lettered
Summary: David and Patrick up through their first kiss.





	Wild and Wired

**Author's Note:**

> By the time I get to a fandom there's usually a million canon retellings so I don't have to write one but in this fandom so far there's only half a million so here you go

When David first met him, David thought Patrick was cute, but only in that “everyone is kind of cute” sort of way. Like, Ray would be cute if he didn’t wear those colors and lost the mustache and got a haircut and maybe, David didn’t know, tattoos. Twyla would be adorable if she set fire to her entire wardrobe and never ever bought her own shoes. Jocelyn was hot that time David had dressed her.

So, Patrick was attractive in that frumpy, boy-next-door, something about baseball kind of way. There should probably be apple pie in that metaphor, and David wasn’t into apple pie. He actively hated baseball. And boys next door, because he’d had such a huge crush on the boy next door when they’d lived in SoCal that he’d let the boy next door’s girlfriend hide in David’s parents’ game room so that she and the boy next door could have sex. In David’s parents’ game room. David had been really, really pathetic. Also, gross.

Actually, whether the guy working at Ray’s was attractive was about the last thing on David’s mind when he went to apply for his business license, and not just because the guy was wearing Wranglers—literally _Wranglers_ , with a _belt_ ; David was thinking about Rose Apothecary. Creek Boutique. No, Rose Apothecary. Creek Boutique was worse than Blouse House would have been, ew. Rose Apothecary. But maybe the name Creek Boutique had more street appeal?

Then this guy, this guy working at Ray’s, asked David what the name should be—straight out of the gate; that was his first question. And after that, more questions. In New York, they wouldn’t have asked so many questions; David could have just explained his vision without all these pedestrian specifics; in New York, they didn’t make artists bother with detail work. 

In New York, his parents had clandestinely contrived every manner in which he had ever felt himself successful. 

Instead this guy had just _sat_ there like a fussy little bureaucrat in his Wranglers with his little smirk and his warm, steady eyes, and they didn’t look at you like that in New York, that directly. They nodded and acted like they understood what you meant without you having to take the trouble to articulate it because your parents were paying them and they didn’t care what the fuck you really wanted; they just wanted the cash. From your parents. Fuck. 

The guy had said for David to come back when he had a clearer idea of what his business was.

David tried not to think about it, that whole conversation. David knew what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was doing; it was just hard to describe, because Schitt’s Creek didn’t know what lifestyle retail in an experimental, well-curated rustic-chic environment was. Or something. Whatever, that guy hadn’t even known what he was talking about. It was annoying, though. The way he’d said David’s business was going to fail. He’d been such a dick.

David told Stevie what a dick he’d been just to get it off his chest, but Stevie told him that the guy at Ray’s wasn’t a dick. Then she’d told him the guy at Ray’s was probably just trying to help. Then she’d given him a joint.

Stevie was really beautiful.

*

David sat in the empty general store, slowly realizing that the problem was that he had never wanted anything so badly.

Well, that wasn’t true. He’d wanted Sheila like this in seventh grade, and Broderick in eighth and Robin also in eighth. When David was sixteen, he’d sucked off Alexis’s math tutor in the back of a Porsche, and before he’d gotten up the courage to do it, he’d felt want so desperately in every fiber of his being that he had thought he might die. He’d thought actual capillaries might burst in his face and his head would melt like on Indiana Jones, ew; it was disgusting, actually, how much he had wanted that hopeless sweaty filthy teenage blow job. 

David had also wanted his galleries to be successful. He’d wanted Alexis not to die in Saudi Arabia and Mom to be proud of him and for his article for _Seventeen_ to be this terrifyingly tremendous success that made Leo notice him, and Alexis not to overdose at fourteen and Dad to be proud of him too, and Alexis not to have STDs, ew, not that he really thought about that, and Mom not to overdose either, and for Alexis to never meet any more Somali pirates. David wanted to be famous without ever having to see his body on camera, and he wanted to smell Mariah Carey, just once, and he wanted to win a Tony for best scenic design in a musical.

David wanted everything. All the time.

He was also high.

But Rose Apothecary was the first thing he’d ever wanted that felt this way—good. Right. His. There was the pounding in his heart kind of want, but also another kind of want, a cool separate intellectual _pragmatic_ , almost worthy of _Wranglers_ kind of want that knew; he _knew_ this was a good idea. He wasn’t being a fool, for once, trusting that something would work out when it wouldn’t. He was being _reasonable_ , and Stevie was probably right. The guy at Ray’s was probably trying to help. Even if he’d been snippy.

David took the business card out of his pocket.

He maybe shouldn’t make a call about something this important to him after having smoked half a joint with Stevie, except that he didn’t think of that until three chocolate muffins and eighteen mistakes on his stupid business application later. David couldn’t remember the messages he’d left on Patrick’s phone, other than his name was Patrick and the messages were sure to be mortifying. Stevie’s hotel whiteout was older than David had been when he’d lost his virginity. Nail polish isn’t a good whiteout substitute, just FYI. David needed a new form.

*

David went back to Ray’s. Patrick made fun of the messages, then said he’d filled out David’s form for him. Then he said the business idea was a good one, and he liked the name, and that was when David noticed Patrick’s mouth.

Patrick was cute in more than a baseball, boy-next-door, something-about-pie way. He was cute in a saved-David’s-business, actively helpful, genuinely genuine sort of way. Patrick wasn’t in it for money; he wasn’t exercising petty civic authority just because he could, and he’d never said David’s business would fail. Patrick had just been doing his job, except more than that because he’d put up with David’s humiliating messages, given him the gentlest of hard times about them, then filled out David’s application form.

Patrick had a _really_ nice mouth. A neat, clean, tidy little mouth that was smiling at David, a lot, and for one wild second David wanted to bite it. He wanted to bite it because Patrick looked wholesome and salty and sweet and had helped him get a business license, and Patrick wore Wranglers, which was one reason—of many—that David was pretty sure he was fucked up. What kind of guy went around wanting to bite people because they looked straighter than Andy Griffith and helped you get a business license? David Rose, that was who.

Then Patrick made fun of him some more, but David deserved it, and he didn’t care. 

He left Ray’s, and he didn’t care, because he had something much, much more important: Rose Apothecary. Patrick had even put that on the form, and the light-heartedness David felt over it, the sudden release of pressure, was so good that he almost didn’t blame himself for wanting to bite the first person he saw. Rose Apothecary.

David went to sleep dreaming of the sand and stone color palette, the lip balm and the Rose label and the arrangements of face cream. He might just be in love with Rose Apothecary. He’d never been in love before. He’d wanted to be; he’d felt hopelessly obsessed more than a few times, but he’d never been in love before. Not like this. 

He went to sleep dreaming about the fact that he’d still need to carry some basic household products, since people still needed things like cleaning materials; where else would they get them? But this wasn’t some Ace Hardware. He’d put the plungers at the back.

*

“Hello?” David said.

“Hi David, this is Patrick.”

“Patrick,” David said, trying not to sound thrilled about his business license.

“Yeah,” said Patrick. “I’m just returning your call.”

David wait a whole half second, which seemed more than he should have to. “And?”

“Still haven’t heard back.”

“Oh.”

“I did say I’d call you,” Patrick said. “When I heard.”

“I know; I just wanted . . .” David might have left some more messages on Patrick’s phone this morning. “Does it usually take this long?”

“It’s been three business days.”

It had been five days. “Oh, because of the weekend.”

“Yes, because of the weekend.” 

David really wanted to hang up, because even though Patrick didn’t actually sound patronizing, David felt stupid. He hated business days. He hated business; why was he doing this? Thinking about the license made him want to crawl out of his skin.

“Are you nervous it won’t go through?” said Patrick.

“Yes. I mean, no.” David opened his mouth at the phone in a silent scream, which was nice because it was on the phone, and Patrick couldn’t see him. “I mean,” he went on, smoothing the back of his hair and trying to sound nonchalant. “Is there a reason it won’t go through? Any . . . reason?”

“None that I can think of. It’s a solid plan.”

“Oh.” Well, that was reassuring. Slightly.

“I should know,” Patrick went on. “I’m a business major.”

Gross, but David didn’t say that out loud. Petting the back of his hair some more so he could sound like a normal person, David said, “Well, then. Um. When can I expect . . . ?”

“Expect what?”

The tone was perfectly innocent. Patrick was teasing him, which—okay. Okay. Maybe David deserved that. It made him feel better, actually, because it meant that Patrick thought David was blowing this out of proportion, which meant Patrick thought David getting his license wasn’t a big deal. And Patrick should know, because he was a business major, and business majors should know. Okay. Okay. David felt suddenly calm, so he said politely, “When can I expect my business license?”

“Oh, your _business_ license,” said Patrick, who was carrying this joke a little too far. “Six to eight weeks.”

“ _Weeks_?”

“I can try and speed it up for you.”

“ _Can_ you?”

“I can try.”

He could try with his business major, probably. Ugh. “Okay.” Realizing he sounded sullen, David added, “Thank you.”

“No problem. Anything else I can do for you?”

“No, that’s it, thanks.”

“All right.”

Patrick should have added something after that, like, “I’ll be seeing you,” or “thanks for the call,” but he didn’t. He just . . . _left_ his “all right” sitting there, alone. All alone. Like some . . . slightly chubby kid who was always picked last for the kickball team. Not that David would know anything about that. “All right,” David echoed, before this got weird. “Well.”

“Well,” was all Patrick said. 

“Um, thank you again.”

“Seriously, no problem. And—call if you need anything.”

“I thought you said you would call me?”

“I will,” said Patrick, “once your license comes through. But if you need anything.”

Quite suddenly, David remembered how last time he’d seen Patrick, he’d wanted to bite his mouth. David felt himself go hot. “What would I need?”

“I just meant I’m here to help.” Then, like this was a normal conversation and not a weird conversation, Patrick said, “Bye David.”

“Bye,” David said, frowning

*

“That was not a weird conversation,” Stevie told him.

“He was just really _nice_ ,” David said, making a face.

“That is not weird,” said Stevie. “If it were you or me, that’d be weird. If it were your mother—”

“Okay, stop.”

Stevie made a face back at him.

“I just . . .” Distracted by the smell of the trash bags Stevie was throwing into the pile, David made another face, then remembered his train of thought. “I just really want to . . .” Oh God, more bags.

“You really want to get that license.”

“And to never ever take out the trash with you again.”

“There’s a joke to be made there about taking you out,” Stevie said, “but I won’t make it.”

“Thanks for that,” David said, watching with a curled lip as Stevie got rid of the last of the trash.

“He said you’d get your license,” Stevie said, walking back toward the motel with him, “and he’s a business major, so he should know. Stop worrying about it.” When Stevie tried to slap him on the back, however, David slunk away.

“Okay, but. Don’t touch me with your hands? Because they smell like trash.”

Snorting, Stevie walked back into the motel. David followed, guessing she was right.

*

“Hello, this is Patrick Brewer.”

“Is that Brewer like Karen Brewer?”

“I . . . don’t know who that is. Is this David?”

David sort of wanted to hang up. He couldn’t figure out whether he was talking about _The Babysitters Club_ because he was nervous about the license or because of the way Patrick had said “if you need anything,” the last time they had talked on the phone. Probably the license. But Patrick still had that mouth.

“Hello?” said Patrick.

“Yes, this is David. So anyway, I was just wondering whether you have any updates?”

“Updates?”

“Okay,” David said quickly, “so I’m going to take it that’s a no.”

“I’m sensing the license thing is bothering you.”

“What gave you that impression?” David asked sarcastically.

“Do you want me to walk you through this?”

“Um. What?”

“Okay, so the business license, that’s the easy part. Due to the nature of your business, there are certain permits that are required at both the federal and the provincial level.”

David swallowed. Patrick was about to get jargony, David could already tell. Maybe David should have been annoyed, except the fact that Patrick knew about all of this was strangely soothing. Did Dad know all of this? Probably. Probably Dad had had to do the exact same thing when he started Rose Video, except that had been in Medieval Times, and also if David asked Dad about it, both his parents would start to doubt whether he could do it. David didn’t want to ask them anything. He didn’t want to ask them _for_ anything. He wanted to ask Patrick. Patrick wore Wranglers. Patrick had a business major. David decided he liked Patrick for these reasons, even though they were the exact opposite of the reasons he’d liked anyone before.

“At the provincial level you’ll need a Food Premises Permit, since you plan to sell consumables. I did the paperwork for you, by the way. And I also did the paperwork for the federal level, which requires a Cosmetics Notification, and for you to register your business to get a business number. And if you plan on hiring employees—which you should, since you’ll need sick days and presumably vacation, and working seven days a week is grueling—”

“Are you speaking from experience?”

“Working seven days a week?” Patrick sounded like he was smiling. “No. But I worked to put myself through school, so that was close.”

“To get a business major.”

“You remembered.” Patrick still sounded like he was smiling.

“It’s sort of hard to forget, with you talking about filing things with the federal—thing.”

“Mm-hm,” Patrick said, making fun of him now.

“Okay, I get why it’s taking so long. I’m just—none of my inventory is here yet either, and I’m . . .” David rolled his eyes, feeling humiliated. “I’m not the most patient person ever, in the world, so we can end this phone call now, thank you—”

“It’s not a problem. I’m really interested to see your store when it opens.”

David sucked in a breath. “My father started a business.”

A pause. “Yeah,” Patrick said finally. “Funny, I think I heard something about that, once. What was it? Blockbuster Video? Or was it Hollywood—”

“Oh my God,” David said.

Patrick just laughed.

“I think it’s impressive,” David said, before he thought about it.

“Yes,” Patrick said slowly. “Rose Video was quite the empire.”

“No, I mean you—you know how to do this, and I—I’ve never done anything before. I mean. Well. I hosted a featured event during Fashion Week in Paris and I wrote an early article in _Teen Vogue_. But I mean. I never did anything real. So thank you, I think, is what I’m trying to say.”

There was another pause. “I’m pretty sure _Teen Vogue_ is real. I saw it once on a magazine rack. And Paris is definitely real. Fashion Week, I’m not sure—”

“Okay, bye, I’m hanging up.”

“I’m glad all that school came in handy,” Patrick said, still sounding amused. “I was sure someone like you would find it boring.”

“Oh, I do,” David said reassuringly, mostly because he wasn’t going to pull apart that “someone like you.” He knew what people saw when they looked at his clothes; he wanted them to see it. If he wanted to hide, he could have worn Wranglers.

But Patrick just laughed again, a warm honeyed sound that was way too nice. “All right. Good bye, David. I’ll keep you updated—when there are updates.”

“Well.” Patrick was making fun of him again, but it was reassuring, the way Stevie making fun of him was reassuring. “See that you do,” David said, and then he hung up, throwing the phone on his bed, mouth twisting so he wouldn’t be smiling at the phone.

*

“Hello,” David said when he answered the phone.

“David? This is Patrick Brewer.”

“Yes, I know that,” David said very slowly. “You gave me your number.”

“Well I—I gave you my business card.”

“Which had your number on it.”

“You put my number in your phone?”

David talked even more slowly. “You said you’d call if my license came through. Is that why you’re calling?”

“No,” said Patrick, “but I have updates.”

“Updates.”

“I thought you wanted updates.”

“That depends on what they are.”

“You are the proud new owner of a Food Premises Permit and a business number. I think we’re just waiting on the Cosmetics Notification, and that should come any day now.”

“But it’s only been—” David calculated in his head—“nine business days.”

“I’ve been making calls.”

Oh. Patrick had been making calls. For David. “I got inventory,” David blurted.

“That’s good, right?” Patrick sounded like he was smiling again, but David couldn’t be sure. It’d been two weeks since David had met Patrick, and David hadn’t seen him since then, so now the way Patrick looked was a little harder to remember. Surely his mouth wasn’t _that_ cute.

“It’s good,” said David. “I’m unpacking it right now.”

“Do you need a hand?”

“Um.” David looked at the three boxes of moisturizer, all three of which he’d already opened, one of which he’d already emptied. Possibly, he shouldn’t have been proud enough to tell random strangers about getting a single store item to stock. “That won’t be necessary.”

“No, really,” said Patrick. “I was about to go on lunch at the café. You’re at the old general store, right? It would be no trouble for me to swing by. Do you want me to pick up something for you?”

“That’s okay.”

“Is that no on lunch, or a no on me dropping by?”

“I already had lunch,” said David’s stupid mouth, which should have said, “There are just three boxes; nothing to see here!” but had not, in fact, said that. The problem was that Stevie was working and David couldn’t tell Mom or Dad or Alexis about the three boxes; they wouldn’t understand what the big deal was. They would pity him for being proud of it. Mom would bring up how he was bullied in school.

“I’m on my way,” said Patrick, and David stopped thinking about Mom. 

Trying to swallow his smile, proving mostly unsuccessful, David said bye and hung up. He was going to have to stop unpacking if Patrick was going to help; he could pretend to be in the middle when Patrick walked in, and when Patrick said something derisive about there only being three boxes, maybe David would be over this, and that would be very nice. David had literally met the guy twice—two five-minute meetings in the same day, so that was barely anything, and Patrick was definitely straight. David was trying to start a business, so he didn’t need this. He didn’t need this in his life right now.

Playing on his phone instead of continuing to unpack, David wanted to text Stevie and tell her he’d had another weird conversation with Patrick, but she’d say it wasn’t weird. She’d say it was flirting, and David would very much resent her because she would be right, at least on his end; why was he flirting; he didn’t need this. Especially with straight guys; that always ended badly.

So instead David read an infuriating article about how Rachel Bloom couldn’t get a designer to dress her for the Emmys because she was “too big,” what the fuck; and it had also happened to Dascha Palanco and Leslie Jones, because designers were monsters. Sometimes David was glad he didn’t know famous people any more, though actually Dascha had been really—”

“You look very busy. I’m almost afraid to interrupt,” said a voice, and David jumped half a mile. “It’s okay; it’s only me,” said Patrick, who put up his hands innocently.

He had on Levi’s.

“I thought—didn’t you say you were going to get lunch first?” asked David, who thought he had been reading for longer than he’d realized, except the article hadn’t been that long.

“I wasn’t sure how much help you needed.” Patrick looked around the store, the only thing in it the vintage table David had sourced with its three boxes on top. “Tons, I see,” Patrick added, and David grimaced at him. Ignoring this, Patrick went over to the boxes, looking down into them before he picked up one of the jars. “What is it?” he asked, turning it over in his hand.

David swallowed hard, deeply resisting shouting at Patrick for touching his very first product. “Moisturizer,” David said huskily over the effort, then coughed. “I haven’t got—my labels printed. They’re coming soon.”

Patrick smiled. “So when you said inventory, you meant . . . ?”

“That,” David said flatly, eyeing the moisturizer in Patrick’s hand and thinking he might shout after all.

“You must be stoked,” Patrick said, setting down the jar. Then he started taking out the other jars, and David wanted to yell at him about that, too, except he also wanted to react to this confoundingly asinine this use of the word “stoked” by moving his head in a circle, apparently.

“ _Stoked_?” he repeated disdainfully, after the head circle.

Patrick glanced up from the jars. “Because it’s your first product,” he said, like it was obvious. “The first thing you’re going to sell in your store. Who was the vendor on this?” 

Patrick began taking out the jars again, and David watched distrustfully, still expecting Patrick to make a joke about David being _stoked_ over three boxes of moisturizer. “No, they go in rows,” he said impatiently, because watching this was making him crazy. Going over to the table, he grabbed one of the jars from Patrick, hating that he noticed that their fingers brushed, and began arranging them in rows.

“Rows, okay,” Patrick said, just sounding amused. “How about I unload; you arrange.”

David snuck a glance at him, but Patrick wasn’t making fun of him. Patrick was just unloading the box, his shirt from Target, probably, and David wanted to lick Patrick’s mouth. His lips were set in a little smile, and when they opened, David quickly looked away.

“Seriously, what vendor?” said the lips with Patrick attached to them. “I didn’t know anyone around here made moisturizer.”

David snuck another glance, but he didn’t actually want to have to look at him. “Brenda,” David said, because maybe Patrick was pretending to be interested.

Patrick kept taking out the jars. “Okay,” he said, after three. “How did you find out about Brenda’s moisturizer?”

“Research.” 

“What research?”

“Do you think I came by this dewy complexion naturally?” David was arranging the jars, but realizing what sort of question he’d asked and that Patrick hadn’t laughed it off, he glanced up.

Patrick was looking at him with that little smirk, like he found David ridiculous but in a privately delightful way. Then he said, “Definitely.”

Feeling like he’d accidentally been set on fire, David looked down to make sure the rows were perfect, saying, “I asked Jocelyn where she got her moisturizer.”

“Jocelyn?” Patrick handed him another jar.

“Jocelyn,” David said, because everyone was supposed to know Jocelyn; that was the way small towns worked. “The mayor’s wife?”

“I know Jocelyn.”

“Well,” David said, thunking down another jar of moisturizer. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but underneath all that _terrible_ foundation is excellent skin.”

“Oh, I’ve noticed,” said Patrick. 

David glanced at him again, but Patrick was just smiling again in what David was learning was that Patrick way—affable and a little bit devious, possibly teasing. David couldn’t tell if Patrick was teasing. Probably he was serious. It had taken a while for David to realize that the whole town thought of Jocelyn as the hot one, which—was not the wrong opinion; it was entirely the correct one, except that everything about her hair and makeup and personal style were absolutely one hundred percent wrong. Anyway, that answered that question, anyway, about what Patrick—how Patrick—what Patrick was. Anyway. It didn’t really, but anyway. 

“Anyway,” David said, clearing his throat as he took another jar from Patrick, “Brenda is one of the Jazzagals.”

“Jazzagals?”

“The women’s a cappella singing group?”

“Schitt’s Creek has an a cappella singing group?”

“Um, yes?”

Patrick handed him a jar. “I didn’t know this town had a music scene.”

“Um, no.” David adjusted the row. “Seattle in the nineties, that was a music scene. This town has a music . . .”

“French scene?”

David stopped adjusting to stare at him.

Patrick just shrugged, then turned back to the box. “I took a theater class.”

“Aren’t you a revelation.”

They worked in silence for a few minutes, and then they were done. David waited again for the disparaging remark about the amount of work there wasn’t left to do, but what Patrick said was, “Do you want me to collapse these boxes?”

“Um, I can . . .” David looked around for the utility knife, cutting the tape on the bottom of the first box, but then Patrick took the box from him.

“You cut; I’ll collapse,” said Patrick, and David felt sort of patronized because there were only three boxes, but he also felt weirdly supported, and he didn’t like it. Why did a guy who dressed that way know what a French scene was? It wasn’t right. Or fair.

“I’ve got to go pick up lunch,” Patrick said, once all the boxes were folded and done. “Sure you don’t want anything?”

“Well, I . . .” David looked around the empty store, as though it could suddenly make something appear so he could look busy, even though he was busy. He still had pickups to arrange, and the deal on the shelving units to finalize, and he wanted to source some plants. Those would be the first things you saw through the window. Everybody liked house plants, so they would be easy to sell, and there were farms for miles so obviously someone around here had plants. Ferns, maybe.

“That hard work has to have built up an appetite,” Patrick said.

“I have to source ferns,” David blurted.

“Ferns?” Patrick’s eyebrows went up. They were cute eyebrows.

“For the . . .” David gestured. “When you walk in. There will be silver pails. With ferns.”

“Oh, in silver pails,” said Patrick. “Now you’re making sense.”

“Fine,” David said. “I need coffee.”

“Thanks for taking on the burden of going to the café with me. I really owe you a favor for this.”

“Okay, maybe you can—not talk?” 

Patrick smiled that same smile, and they walked over to Café Tropical.

David had almost forgotten how this worked. Scratch that; he had no idea how this worked, and he never really had. Middle and high school had been very awkward; in the nineties, being queer had mostly been about AIDS and Tom Hanks in _Philadelphia_. But then there had been Ellen DeGeneres and _Brokeback Mountain_ , and people had started talking about gay bars openly, as though they were not some secret dens of crime. His mother had advocated getting a gay character on _Sunrise Bay_ who _wasn’t_ dying of AIDS, which David had appreciated. 

By the time he was twenty, he’d had more options. There were gay bars and gay clubs and straight women, and in certain scenes, like Hollywood and the Village and the entire fashion industry, finding out who was gay or who didn’t mind if you liked everything was easy. Not that there weren’t drawbacks to some of that lifestyle; there were so many drawbacks; Kevin Spacey was one. But being queer had made David feel like less of a freak than it had in high school, even if he still felt like a freak in every other way possible.

But now they were in Schitt’s Creek, which didn’t even have a godforsaken Tim Hortons and only had one bar, and it felt like high school. This was like high school, having a hopeless crush on the star school pitcher and wishing a hole would open in the ground to swallow you because you didn’t know and didn’t know how to ask and would likely be looked at strangely if you did. Like literally, Patrick was wearing Kenneth Cole Oxfords; he wasn’t gay.

Except that he’d come over to help David with his inventory and asked about his vendors and wanted to get him lunch. Maybe Patrick was just really interested in the store. He’d said he was. “What do you do at Ray’s? Again?” David asked as Patrick held the door to the café open for him, which made David even more uncomfortable.

“Oh, you want me to talk now?”

“Maybe not,” David said, heading for the juice bar.

“I’m Ray’s business assistant,” Patrick said, which explained everything. 

“How’s that working out for you?”

“He pays me.”

“Mm-kay. Yeah, hi,” he said to Twyla, as she approached with her pad. “I’ll have the caramel machiatto with skim, two sweeteners, sprinkle of cocoa powder.”

Patrick got a tuna melt, gross, smiling at Twyla, which he should—because it was polite, David guessed, but Twyla was cute. Really cute. Twyla, really, should’ve been the hot one, but David guessed the locals liked big hair? Or something.

“I met Ray at a business seminar,” Patrick said when Twyla was gone.

“Uh-huh,” said David, pretending he was listening. It wasn’t like he’d asked for Patrick’s whole life story.

“He seemed like a real entrepreneur,” said Patrick. “I like entrepreneurs.”

David started listening again.

“I always liked the idea of being involved in something like that,” Patrick went on. “I mean, it’s a great investment opportunity to be involved in something at the ground level, but I think what really interests me is the building aspect. You make a dream become a reality.”

“Ray is making _many_ things a reality,” David said, because that was a generous way of putting it, and he was a generous person.

“Yeah. It’s . . . not exactly what I expected.”

Patrick sounded disappointed, and David didn’t know what he was supposed to do about that. Was he supposed to do something about that? Was this why Patrick had offered to help him with his inventory and wanted to get coffee, because he was some lonely guy, bored with his job, having a crisis, and this was like—this was like a bro thing? Oh God. Patrick didn’t look like a bro, but he looked like someone who could possibly have bros, like bro friends—except there was no way he could think David would be a bro. Though in David’s experience, bros were _awful_ at picking up signals; oh God, where was Twyla? He needed sugar for this, and caffeine; should he recommend Patrick get therapy? 

“Tea,” Twyla said, setting a teacup down in front of Patrick, “and here’s your caramel machiatto with sweetener.”

“Oh, thank God.” David looked down at his mug, then back up at Twyla. “Um. Cocoa powder?”

“Oh, right. Your tuna melt will be right up,” she added, nodding at Patrick, who was smirking—possibly due to the complexity of David’s coffee order.

Oh, God, this was totally a bro thing. David took a big swig of coffee. 

“So.” Patrick sipped his tea. “What about your other inventory?”

“I have other inventory,” David snapped.

“I know,” Patrick said slowly. “That was why I asked about it.”

David covered his face by taking another sip from his mug, but Patrick was just smiling at him—that affable/devious smile again, teasing, but not about the fact that David only had three boxes and yet had proudly announced that he had inventory. Patrick was possibly teasing David for _expecting_ to be teased about that, but Patrick wasn’t teasing _about that_. “Um,” David said, putting down his coffee and trying to be less of an asshole. “I mean. What do you want to know?”

“When’s it coming in? Who are your other vendors?”

“Why are you so curious?”

Patrick just looked at him, and his mouth really was that cute. “I literally just said to you I’m interested in entrepreneurial ventures.”

“Yes, well. People around me don’t say things like ‘entrepreneurial ventures.’”

“Maybe you need someone else around you.”

Oh God. Quickly reaching for his coffee, David drank it and didn’t look at him.

Patrick just drank his tea in that affable/devious way, pretending like he hadn’t said anything that could be considered flirtatious—which he probably hadn’t meant to anyway, and then Twyla brought the tuna melt. “And the cocoa powder?” David asked her, before she went away.

“Oh, right,” said Twyla, in that tone that meant she was totally going to forget again.

“I’ve been trying to expedite the license process for you,” Patrick said, arranging things fussily on his tuna melt, “and you wanted updates. I just thought maybe _I_ could get updates. You know, so I can help you out. But if you don’t want to update me, I can just—”

“Why are you guilt tripping me?”

“I’m not trying to guilt trip you.”

“No one is interested in inventory or vendors! My dad just talks about stocking video, and my _mom_ thinks what I’m doing is ‘an exercise’, like finger-painting in pre-K, and Alexis has literally never listened to me for more than forty-seven seconds at a time, and Stevie keeps saying I need to chill it with the shop talk!” 

David’s voice had risen, and he knew he was being ridiculous except he couldn’t seem to stop, such that when Twyla put the cocoa powder in front of him and said, “Here’s your cocoa powder,” David’s “thank you!” was practically a shout. 

Twyla’s eyes widened as she backed away, and then Patrick looked at him and said, “I’m interested.” He kind of seemed to be laughing at David’s outburst, a bit, but his eyes were dark and very, very sincere. “I understand if you don’t want to tell me about it, but—I’m interested.”

Oh God. Patrick’s mouth was _really_ cute; he was wearing _Kenneth Cole_. He was interested in the _store_ , in entrepreneurial ventures; that was the only explanation for any of this. Luckily, just then Patrick also started eating his tuna melt, which made him significantly less cute because tuna.

“Shaving cream and cologne,” David said. “From Mennonites.”

Patrick looked at him inquiringly as he chewed his tuna.

David made a face. “There’s actually a whole shaving set—with a clay bowl and old-fashioned brush. It’s horsehair. You have to work the cream into a lather. In the bowl. With the brush.”

“Is there a straight razor?”

David shook his head. “Mm-mm. I’m not going to carry murder weapons in my store.”

Patrick laughed. He was still kind of cute, even if he was eating tuna.

“They also make mortars and pestles,” David said.

“So how did you know the Mennonites made products you could sell?”

“Funny story,” David said falsely, then didn’t tell him about accidentally sleeping with Stevie, but did tell him about how he left town and Alexis hadn’t even bothered to tell his parents where he was, and no one had come to get him. Then he told Patrick about the beeswax candles, lip balm, and honey by the Ellis’s, who kept bees, and the shampoo and mousse, also by Brenda, and Rick who lived in a creepy shack but did excellent woodwork.

Patrick listened attentively, with his tuna and his smile and his big brown eyes, asking questions sometimes but seeming mostly content to listen. Then he asked about revenue projections, budget, tax plans, and insurance.

“Um,” said David. “Revenue projections?”

Patrick smiled, then began to explain.

He must be really, really interested in the store.

*

Alexis said Patrick wasn’t interested in the store.

Patrick had come to the store to drop of David’s business license, which had resulted in Alexis mercilessly flirting with Patrick, something which David didn’t actually mind. If David had minded Alexis flirting with hot guys he was interested in, that would have been a real problem, and Alexis would likely still be in a holding cell in Guam. For Alexis, flirtation was like respiration. David might as well ask her to lay down in a morgue, except David hadn’t actually been able to read Patrick’s response to Alexis; he’d just been genial. That was the word for Patrick, _genial_ , but also droll. He laughed at people. 

“So, what’s going on there?” David asked Alexis the next day, after he asked her to help again, and she had tried to explain sweat equity to him.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, sounding put out. “He hasn’t even asked for my phone number, which, in my experience, means that he’s either newly married or he’s gay. So, like, if you’re sensing a vibe or something, maybe that means that his eye is on somebody else.”

Then she winked.

Ugh.

Of course, Alexis knew. She’d known about his thing for Sheila when he was in seventh grade when Alexis herself had _literally_ been a third grader; she’d known how desperately he’d wanted Mom to see the set he’d worked on with Rumi Matsui; she’d known about the time he’d had to get his stomach pumped for alcohol poisoning in Malibu when she had been in _Mallorca_. 

People talked about a mother’s intuition, but his own mother had never in her life known what was going on with him while Alexis always had, and it wasn’t exactly fair since they hadn’t ever been close. She’d barely spent enough time in North America to be considered a resident, but she’d told him Lucia Giavanni was probably cheating on him three weeks before he’d figured it out for himself, so of course she knew about Patrick. 

Except that she was wrong on one count, because David knew Patrick better than she did, and David was ninety-two percent certain Patrick wasn’t gay. Eighty-six percent. A good seventy-nine percent.

*

“My sister isn’t here,” David had told Patrick that afternoon, when Patrick had randomly shown up at the store.

“I’m not here for your sister.” Patrick had just _looked_ at him after, silently saying, _I’m here for you,_ and a fist had closed over David’s heart, heat crawling into his cheeks like hot hands scratching over them. Patrick had been the one to break the silence after David’s whispered, “Okay,” looking around the store and talking about the feasibility of his business plan, then telling David that they were going to be business partners.

Patrick hadn’t asked if David wanted to be business partners; he’d told. If Patrick had asked, David probably would have hesitated, because David didn’t want to accept anyone’s help on this, even though—as Patrick had said—David desperately needed it. David needed no help at all at self-sabotage. He really excelled at it, in fact. He should have majored in it; then he could have a major just like Patrick did.

But Patrick hadn’t given him a choice, which Mom and Dad and Alexis and Stevie and eighty percent of David’s partners had learned was the best way to get David to do anything. He might talk a lot of smack, but he was terrible at saying no. He was really, really bad at it; he had in fact done really terrible things because of it, and the other twenty percent of his partners who hadn’t figured that out were probably people he shouldn’t have dated in the first place, because if they hadn’t figured out he responded really, really fucking receptively to being bossed around, then they had been idiots and also terrible in bed. But mostly idiots.

Patrick wasn’t an idiot.

He was smart. He was really, really smart. He’d come into the store and started talking about start-up money and grants and how David was going to have to start paying him. “You do know that if the grant money doesn’t come through,” David had started to say, because he obviously wasn’t going to pay someone who wasn’t actually helping him.

Patrick had cut him off. “Oh, I’m going to get the money,” was all he said, and that sort of thing worked on David as well as not giving him a choice worked on him.

It worked on him so well that he could only say, “Okay,” hoping Patrick wouldn’t notice that he sounded breathless, because David didn’t like for people to know these things about him. His entire family walked around making over-confident pronouncements and telling people what to do, and so did David, but that meant it shouldn’t work on him. That was exactly why it shouldn’t work on him, and he worried that that was why it did work on him. That was what his therapist had said, that Mom had fucked up his life by deciding what his life would be, that he had let his partners make decisions for him because he was so used to it. 

_Work on independence_ , his therapist had told him, but David _was_ working on it. He was working on it, but fuck, that didn’t really mean he had to run every aspect of a new business all by himself, did it, especially when he didn’t know what he was doing? And Patrick did know what he was doing. He wasn’t saying, _Trust me_ , because he had a big thick dick or beautiful hair or cruel, exciting new ways of making David feel that he was loved when it was all a lie, like every other person who had told David to trust them. Patrick was saying, _Trust me_ , because he was a business major who had concrete ideas about start-up money and grants and was interested in _entrepreneurial ventures_. 

Patrick’s jeans today were from The Gap. 

(Where was this outlet mall where he shopped? David wanted to know.)

Patrick was responsible. He was responsible and he was smart and he was nice and he was _normal_. David had read about this sort of person in books and seen them on TV, “just your average joe,” but David’s life had never been normal. The people in this town were supposedly normal, but they all seemed, um, well, not the brightest or else kind of crazy, or sometimes both. Like not to be a bitch or anything, but just for instance, Twyla was a real sweetheart, and a comparison to a post in terms of intelligence would not have been untoward. Ray, probably _really_ smart, but a total parody of sane. And Stevie—drop-dead gorgeous, sensationally intelligent Stevie, was just as much of an asshole as David was and almost as unreliable in terms of having her life together. 

Like. There were not other _people_ like Patrick in this town or in David’s life, ever, except for maybe Ted and Ted thought, _I had to deal with dogs all day today, and boy, it was ‘ruff’_ , was funny. Ted probably wouldn’t know the first thing about local business grants, because Ted was a veterinarian, and Ted wasn’t offering to help him anyway; Patrick was. So even if Patrick was gay after all, it was a non-starter. David knew better than to destroy the best thing that had happened for Rose Apothecary so far. Therefore, the faint buzzing at the back of his brain that kept reminding him of what Alexis had said could fuck right off.

But there had been a moment—just a little moment during that conversation, when Patrick had said, “And in the interest of us potentially working together, I did want to come clean about something,” and David’s heart had crawled into his throat.

 _Fuck Alexis for being right_ , David had thought, while at the same time he’d thought, _Tell me you know I’m interested, and you’re not and won’t ever be_ , and at the same time as _that_ , he’d thought, _Tell me you’re interested_.

Patrick had looked serious for once, sounding as though speaking was just a little difficult. Then he’d looked away, and made a joke, and tension had sluiced out of David like water in a floodway. This was easier; it was so much easier, but a part of him still felt certain that was not actually what Patrick had wanted to say, or even if it was, he’d made it tense on purpose. And Patrick was a tease, but you didn’t make things tense on purpose like _that_ unless—unless—

This was easier. Pretending nothing was happening was easier. David was going to pretend nothing was happening, because nothing was, and then Sebastien Raine came to town.

*

Sebastien had practically pinched David’s cheeks when he’d called him “brave.” He meant that David was pathetic, and Sebastien had come on to Stevie right in front of him, and it had been humiliating. The whole thing was humiliating—that this whole schtick had ever worked on David, that it still worked on him, that he still wanted the way that Sebastien had once made him feel—singular and lovely and adored. 

Sebastien had made David feel like a jewel on a satin pillow to be admired from every angle, and David had loved it, that attention. He’d always wanted to be precious to someone, such that even when Sebastien had let people handle him, just like a jewel, even when Sebastien had _sold_ him, just like a jewel, David had let him. He’d let him, and he’d missed the feeling when Sebastien was gone.

By the time David had gotten to the store that morning, he’d worked himself into a fury over it, and Patrick had called twice, but David hadn’t answered, because he was a little bitch. Around lunchtime, Patrick knocked on the door. While David considered not answering, he wasn’t _that_ much of a little bitch, but he did say, “Um, I’m not really in the mood for company.”

Patrick smiled; why the fuck was he always smiling? “That’s too bad, since I just put in my two weeks so I could work here.”

“Whatever.” David walked away from the door, because if Patrick really thought he was going to work here, he was going to have to deal with this.

Patrick closed the door behind him and came to look at what David was doing. “I see your labels came.” He picked up one of the bottles that David had just finished. “Can you drink this?”

“See,” David said loudly, in a falsely explanatory voice, “this is why we have labels that say _body_. It says for your _body_.”

“It also says milk.”

David knew he was being a bastard. He knew it, and it wasn’t Patrick’s fault, and he needed to stop. So he didn’t say anything, just continued applying the labels.

“I feel like if I thought you might be able to drink it, other people might think that too,” said Patrick.

“Anyone with a fiber of common sense would know you couldn’t drink it.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, putting the bottle back. “I’ve got a lot to tie up at Ray’s, so I only have the lunch break, but I thought I could work on those grants a bit. Brought a laptop,” he added, holding up an ugly case. “Might’ve known whether you had a computer yet if you’d answered your phone.”

David kept putting on labels.

“Have you eaten?”

“I ate half a cheesecake for breakfast,” David snapped.

Patrick was silent for so long that David finally looked at him. Patrick was just standing there with his very simple, very JC Penny look, his skin very clear and his eyes very big and his lashes very long, his perfect mouth pulled up in a mystified little half-smile. David wanted to do something ugly; he wanted to do something so ugly that Patrick would stop smiling and stop being nice to him forever.

“One of my former lovers is in town.” Voice falsely bright, David went back to the labels.

“I take it you’re not happy about this?”

“Oh, I’m thrilled. It was so much fun to learn that while he was fucking me, he was also fucking half of the cast of the revival of _Rent_.” David looked up to see how Patrick took it, but Patrick was smiling, he was fucking _smiling_ , but not in a _that’s hilarious_ or a _you’re obviously pathetic_ kind of way, but in a _I know you’re trying to shock me_ kind of way. Apparently, David hadn’t shocked him enough. “My mother asked him here,” David said, turning back to the labels again. “It could be just like old times. Maybe he’ll fuck her too.”

Even David was shocked by the fact that he had said this. The tension inside him cranked to eleven; surely, Patrick would leave him alone now.

“Are you sure half a cheesecake was enough?” Patrick asked lightly. “Do you want me to go find the other half of it for you?”

Patrick wasn’t going to leave him alone.

Just like that, the tension released. David’s whole body felt lighter, easier to bear. He felt so grateful that he wanted to look at Patrick again, except he thought his eyes might burn. “That will not be necessary,” he said, turning to the moisturizers.

“Are you sure?” said Patrick. “Because to do this grant, you’re going to have to look at some spreadsheets, and it sort of sounds like you’ve been punished enough.”

If David had still been in a bad mood, he would have said something filthy about being punished, but as it was, he already felt about a thousand times better. “I don’t do spreadsheets,” was all he said, still a little sulky but almost apologetically. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

“I’m starting to,” Patrick said ominously, putting his hideous case on the register counter and opening it up. While David finished putting labels on the moisturizer, Patrick messed with the laptop for a bit, then said, “Come over here.”

David went over there.

Patrick turned the laptop toward him, revealing—surprise surprise—a spreadsheet. “These are revenue and cost projections for our first month,” he said, leaning in to highlight a row. He smelled like Old Spice, and David kind of wanted to smell him forever. “And the next month, and the next. I did the whole year,” he said, tapping the keys to move through the rows. Then he explained how he’d come up with all the numbers and the formulae he’d used to come up with the totals at the end—that was what he said, ‘formulae’; dammit, he was _such_ a nerd.

David occasionally said, “Mm,” and listened to Patrick’s low, friendly voice and inhaled Old Spice until Patrick said, “Do you think that will work?”

“Um,” said David. “Can you explain it again?”

“No,” Patrick said, because David had forgotten Patrick was also a sass master. Moving away from the register counter, Patrick took his Old Spice with him.

“Why not?” said David. “I wasn’t listening.”

“That’s why. Go on,” Patrick said, nodding at the laptop. “You’re smart enough to figure it out for yourself.”

 _I’m not_ , David wanted to protest, but he had been told he was intelligent so rarely in his life that he couldn’t bear to object, so he turned back to the laptop and figured it out for himself. He really did understand most of it, though ugh, he hated Excel, so he tentatively pecked at the keyboard like it might bite him to move around in the rows.

Patrick had wandered over to the table with the bottles and the labels, which was very worrying. Finally, David gave into the urge to look over to see whether he was ruining anything, and Patrick quickly turned his gaze to the table. David was sixty-nine percent certain that that gaze had been on him originally. Biting down a smile, David turned back to Excel. “I thought we agreed I would handle the creative stuff, and you would do the business.”

“I still have to run the business stuff by you.”

“Then what are you doing with my labels?”

“Just looking.”

“Mm-mm,” David said knowingly, tapping the keyboard. “’ _Looking_.’” He was also sixty-nine percent certain Patrick was looking at him again, but David was embarrassed about the idea that he might be wrong and even more embarrassed by the idea that he might be right, so he let the itchy feeling squirm and die in his gut as he tapped the keyboard some more. When he was done figuring it all out, he turned back to Patrick, who was smelling the Mennonite cologne. “That won’t do you any favors,” David told him.

Patrick, who had just flinched back from the scent, looked at him and said, “Why are you selling it, then?”

“It will do other people favors. Not you.”

“You don’t think I could pull it off?”

“Your thing is less cosmopolitan musk and more—fresh.”

“I could pull off cosmopolitan musk.”

David said brightly, “I think you should try Old Spice.”

“I’m wearing Old Spice.”

“Really?”

Patrick pressed his lips in over a smile, his whole everything transmitting _Hit, a very palpable hit!_ because David had managed to draw him in to his stupid little game, and David forgot why this had started out a bad day. 

David could feel his own mouth curving in response, so he pursed his lips and said, “You’re very conservative.”

“Oh, and Mennonites aren’t?”

“I meant in your estimates for my business. Mennonites wouldn’t have projected such low sales.”

“Our business,” said Patrick. “I don’t think the Mennonites would have dropped everything within three weeks of hearing about a retail startup begun by someone with no business sense just so they could invest in what probably is a risky business.”

“Okay, first of all? The Mennonites would never have been working for Ray. Second of all, ‘risky business?’ Who are _you_? Tom Cruise? Third of all—”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Third of all, ‘someone with no business sense?’ Let’s not forget, mister, I’m the one who hired you.”

This time Patrick’s smile was incredulous, because David was beginning to realize that each one of Patrick’s smiles said a different thing. This one said that they both knew that David hadn’t hired Patrick and that Patrick didn’t even need to remind him of that. Instead all Patrick said was, “’Mister’?”

David opened his mouth to swallow his smile, and it didn’t work. It didn’t work; his face hurt. It actively hurt; the very bones of his face were being rearranged to smile at Patrick, and David swung back to the laptop so that Patrick wouldn’t see the alien contortions. David liked him _so much_ , and when he begun tapping the keyboard again and saw all of Patrick’s very careful formulae, he said, “Yes. I think that this will work.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, coming back over to the register counter. “Let’s figure out how to put it into language for the grant.”

David wanted to close his eyes and bask in the scent of Old Spice, so he moved away, back over to the table where he picked up his labels. “We can talk about it while I put all these labels on,” he said. “There are a lot.”

“Yes, boss,” Patrick said innocently.

David stared steadfastly at his labels, peeling one off to put it on the cologne. “You think you’re cute.”

“I’m ‘fresh’.”

“Is this ‘grant language’?” David said, still fixated on the labels and a little irritated, now, because he sort of wanted to blow Patrick behind the register desk.

“All right,” said Patrick. “But I’m not conservative.”

“More conservative than me.” David put another label on, and he’d said it softly, but maybe a little too bitterly, because Patrick had grown quiet. When David finally glanced up at him, though, Patrick was looking intently at the computer.

As if sensing David’s gaze, Patrick glanced at him, then began to talk about the grant. 

*

That night David fucked Sebastien Raine. David fucked him because Sebastien had used him; Sebastien had used him like a fucking dishrag. Sebastien used people. That was what he did, but he didn’t get to use Mom; _no one_ got to use Mom, and David fucked him because _work on independence_. He was sure that revenge-fucking was not therapist-approved, but it had felt good. 

It had felt good. David had planned on sleeping with him; he’d gone to Sebastien’s room in his leather jacket and let Sebastien seduce him. He’d let Sebastien think he was playing him, just like Sebastien had played him several times before; he’d let Sebastien think he was pathetic. David had gotten a blowjob and an extremely dirty fuck out of it, not to mention the memory card with his mother’s pictures, and he’d gotten to save Mom and rub Sebastien’s face in it as well, and he’d loved it. He’d loved it. He never got to feel like that—powerful, in control, the master of his own destiny.

“I’m leaning in,” his mother had said, before David had fucked Sebastien. “Maybe you should try it some time.”

So David had leaned in. He’d taken control; he’d taken what he wanted, and he’d gotten laid. 

He had obviously really needed to.

*

Patrick came over almost every day on his lunch break, first running all the grant stuff by David, next building spreadsheets for things like inventory and vendors. The guy was obsessed with spreadsheets, and David had written all of that stuff down very neatly in a gorgeous black book with thick cream-colored paper, but Patrick thought digital was better. “What if the place burns down?” Patrick had asked, and then they’d had to have a whole conversation about insurance, which was what Patrick was working on these days.

A week and a half after Patrick had put in his notice with Ray, Patrick’s lunch breaks spent at the store started to grow longer, because he was finishing up most of the loose ends he’d still had with Ray’s businesses, and Ray was fine with letting Patrick go earlier if it meant he had to pay Patrick a little less. At last, the two weeks were up, and David walked up to the store one morning to find Patrick standing outside of it.

“You look very Dickensian,” David informed him, holding out his coffee to Patrick. “Like the lost little match girl.”

“You got me coffee?”

“That’s mine. You’re holding it for me so I can unlock.”

“Do match girls hold coffee?”

“They do now,” said David, getting the door open and snatching his coffee out of Patrick’s hand.

“I thought we were meeting at nine.”

“I don’t really do things before that time.” David tossed the key on the register counter, then stared with disdain at the IKEA boxes by the windows. He hated that he’d resorted to buying IKEA, but the rustic ladder shelves he’d imagined finding in an old barn did not exist, and these would have to do to hold the houseplants for now. He’d been going to open the boxes yesterday, but Patrick had asked if he’d wanted help assembling them. Apparently, you had to assemble things from IKEA? Who knew. They should charge less for that.

“David,” Patrick was saying. “We agreed the store would open at nine. If you can’t be here by nine, that will be a problem.”

“That’s why you’ll take the morning shift.”

“We can’t split up shifts like that. We have to do it by days of the week so we can both have days off, not by AM and PM.”

“You complain a lot,” David said, sipping his coffee.

“Maybe because I was standing outside for half an hour waiting for you!”

“It’s only nine-twenty.”

“I got there early.”

“Whose fault is that?” David asked.

“Wow. You are—really incredible.”

“Thanks.” Still looking at the IKEA boxes, David took another sip of his coffee. “I got you a present.”

“Is it tea?” Patrick said, rather savagely. “Because I noticed you had time to get coffee for yourself.”

“Usually, when someone tells me they got me a present, I’m grateful and excited.”

The stormy silence that followed was so long that David finally turned and looked at him, remorse beginning to clench up his spine because for once in this weird business relationship, Patrick was not smiling. Patrick was actually actively annoyed with him, though he hadn’t really been when David had shown up—no, Patrick was annoyed that David had been blasé about making him wait, which David had thought he could get away with because of the gift. But the gift probably wasn’t enough to make up for it. He should have made a better effort. He should have been—David winced—less selfish.

Patrick was basically never selfish. He’d thrown himself into David’s dream like it was his own, and he’d never asked for anything except for David to keep his hands off all the accounting. He’d never asked for a “cute little label” under his, which had been the first thing that Alexis had done, and he’d never questioned David’s choices, which was always what Stevie did, and he’d believed in David whole-heartedly. That meant a lot because Patrick’s heart was so big; it was bigger than David deserved. He didn’t deserve Patrick, and he knew it. He had no idea why Patrick was here.

“Look on the counter,” David muttered, and Patrick went over to look at the counter. David turned back to glare at the boxes from IKEA. There were two of them, each about four feet by one foot by six inches, which didn’t seem right. The ladder shelves were supposed to be five and half feet tall.

“This is your key to the store,” said Patrick.

“It’s your key.” David drank more coffee, because it was basically the only thing keeping him from dying of shame right now.

“You got me a key.”

David whirled to face him. “I don’t do things before nine. I’m not— _good_ before nine.”

Patrick looked at him with his big brown eyes. The corner of his lips quirked up in a smile—the little one, the tenderest one.

David spun around again to face the boxes, chugging the rest of his coffee like a teen model with a bottle of tequila.

“Two days,” said Patrick.

David waited for the rest, because he already knew Patrick was going to make him feel better, and God, he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve it. 

“You have to be here at nine for two days of the week. The rest—you can get here when you’re ready. Maybe I’ll go home early some nights.”

David faced him again. “Explain that to me,” he said, trying to stop his face from communicating that he hated everything about this conversation.

“Well, going home early some nights means I might leave at four, maybe four-thirty, get some laundry done—”

“Stop it.”

Patrick’s bit his lip, which was just another kind of smile. “We should both get a weekend day. Say you work Tuesday through Saturday; that means I’d do Sunday through Thursday. That means you’d only have two days you don’t overlap with me, Friday and Saturday, so those are the days you’d have to come in at nine.”

David frowned. “You just said I had to come in at nine on a Saturday.”

“Are you saying you want Sunday through Thursday?”

Patrick was still smiling, but he was very serious about this, so David tried to fake that he wasn’t swallowing something distasteful when he said, “Yes, please.”

“Okay.”

“Is that . . . ?” David closed his eyes, knew he couldn’t _possibly_ fake it this time, took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and said, “Is that the schedule _you_ want?”

Patrick smirked at him, a very _that was hard for you, wasn’t it, poor baby_ , smile, except that Patrick probably didn’t call him baby except in David’s fevered dreams, which were very difficult given that he _shared a room with his sister_. “I knew you’d want Sunday through Thursday.”

“So you used me working Saturday in your example just to fuck with me?”

Patrick’s smirk deepened. “Suck it up,” he said, slapping David on the shoulder as he walked by him. “Guess what we get to do today! Assemble IKEA furniture! You’re gonna love it.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“And I get to use my key to open these boxes!”

Patrick actually seemed pleased about that, which maybe meant the key had been enough after all, and he was reaching into his back pocket to get it out, a sight that David actually _was_ pleased about. Turning away because otherwise Patrick would see him blatantly check him out, David again tried to settle his disquiet with caffeinated sugar before realizing he was still out of coffee. He’d guzzled it like an addict because Patrick was too good for him, and David turned around again. “You didn’t say you wanted Sunday through Thursday.”

“What?” Halfway through opening the box, Patrick smiled up at him.

“You didn’t say you wanted Sunday through Thursday,” David repeated. “You just said you knew I wanted Tuesday through Saturday.”

Patrick’s smile turned tender again, and David desperately missed his caffeine; he was crushing his paper cup in his hand. “It’s good with me,” Patrick said, turning back to the box.

“But is it what you _want_ ,” David said loudly.

“Maybe you haven’t figured this out by now,” Patrick said, continuing to open the box, “but I want what you want.” He started pulling pieces of wood out of the box. “For the business, I mean.”

“Oh. Okay. I don’t exactly want to come in at nine on Sunday and Monday either.”

Patrick pursed his lips at the wood, which was also a smile, and just said, “Don’t push it.”

“You know, Stevie just sets her own hours,” David said, thinking he should maybe throw away this empty cup he was crushing, except he really liked watching Patrick crawl around on the floor.

“Stevie’s a real entrepreneur.”

“She does run her own business,” David pointed out. “That’s more than you can say.”

“Also, she puts up with you. I _wish_ that was more than I can say.”

David watched as Patrick pulled out more of the pieces of wood. “’Puts up with me’ is wording what Stevie does very strongly,” he finally said.

“I mean,” said Patrick, pulling a white booklet out from a plastic bag that had been in the box. “She hasn’t killed you yet, and you say you guys are friends. So.”

“’Yet’ being the operative word.”

“I guess I haven’t killed you either,” Patrick said, putting the book on the floor and laying out the pieces of wood. “Yet.”

“Out of people likely to kill me,” said David, “Stevie is at the top of the list. You’re like. Really far down on the list. Like, down there with Andy Samberg.”

Patrick smiled up at him—an incredulous one, this time. “Why does Andy Samberg want to kill you?”

“He doesn’t,” David said loftily. “I did his wife a favor.”

“Then I’m definitely higher on the list than Andy Samberg.”

“You don’t want to kill me,” David told him.

“Are you sure?” Patrick asked. “Because you’re the one who ordered ladder shelves from IKEA, except I’m the one putting them together.”

“I’m supervising.”

“Supervising,” said Patrick. “Did you learn that job skill from Stevie too?”

“Um, no. I’m a natural leader.”

“No wonder Stevie wants to kill you,” said Patrick, but David rolled his eyes, went to throw his coffee away, then came back and—ew, sat on the floor to help Patrick put the ladder shelves together, which mostly meant holding things that Patrick told him to hold and screwing things that Patrick told him to screw.

He really, really wanted to make clever quips about the screwing, except Patrick had gotten kind of immersed in the project, and anyway, David didn’t really know how Patrick would handle that kind of teasing. It wasn’t the kind of teasing they did, not quite. Their teasing was different than it was with Stevie; it was—softer. Kinder.

David sort of wanted his hand to accidentally brush Patrick’s while they put together the IKEA shelf ladders, then realized this entire line of thinking was from one of his mother’s Hallmark movies. Oh, God. He was in a Hallmark movie. A Hallmark movie with Patrick. 

“What kind of movies do you like?” David asked, just to stop his brain.

Patrick smirked at him. “I always really liked the ones from Rose Video.”

*

“Hello,” Stevie said, when David walked into the motel office the next morning. “Would you like to reserve a room?”

“Is my dad around?” said David. “I need the car.”

“Excuse me, have we met? Am I supposed to know you, because I don’t think we’ve—”

“Okay, you’re not funny. I’ve been busy.”

“Too busy to walk the five meters from your room?”

David made a face at her. “I didn’t notice you walking the five meters from your room.”

“This isn’t a room; it’s an office. Where I _work_? Maybe I don’t have time for chatting.”

“Um, excuse me, I work too, in case you forgot about that whole business I started by myself.”

Swallowing a smile, Stevie made her voice falsely bright when she said, “By yourself? I heard you got a _business partner_.”

David ground his teeth together. “Okay, I was going to tell you.”

“Tell me? Why would I need to know? I suffered through hearing every detail of which of the five _soaps_ out of thirteen _soaps_ you were going to sell at your store; that’s much more important than the fact that you’re entrusting your whole business model to some rando.”

David’s lip curled. “You just said ‘business model’,” he pointed out. “Anyway, he’s not a rando; he’s Patrick.”

Stevie just looked at him, a smile pushing in the corners of her mouth that she wasn’t quite letting do anything else to her face, except that her eyes were bright as blackberries. “Right, the weirdly nice guy.”

David lifted his chin to look down at her loftily. “He _is_ nice.”

“The weirdly nice guy who said your business was going to fail.”

“Okay,” David said, chin snapping down. “He didn’t say my business was going to fail.”

Stevie pressed her lips together. “Uh-huh.”

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“Sounds like the start of a beautiful—business relationship.”

David lifted his chin again. “It was.”

“I mean. I have my own business partner, and you sound really busy, and I actually _am_ busy, so maybe we—don’t need to talk any more? I’m not really getting anything out of this relationship, so—”

“Okay, your business partner? Is my dad.”

“Well.” Blinking, Stevie pretended to consider this. “He’s like an older, smarter, more responsible version of you, so I’m not sure why I would—”

“Okay, first of all, I’m nothing like my dad.”

Stevie swallowed hard, which meant she was trying not to laugh. “Your eyebrows would beg to differ.”

“Second of all, my dad presided over catastrophic business _failure_? No one’s ever embezzled from Patrick.”

“Patrick’s never run a business.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked him up. Online.” When David began to smile at her knowingly, she shrugged in discomfort. “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a serial killer. You don’t always make smart choices, you know, and it isn’t like you _told_ me he was your business partner—”

“I’m sensing a theme, here.”

“No theme,” said Stevie, shrugging it off again.

“No, there’s a definite theme. I once went to a Jared Leto party where there was not supposed to be a theme, but there was a theme.” Stevie looked at him blankly, but this was a good one, so David went on, “Assholes. The theme was assholes. Everyone had to be an asshole to go to that party.”

“No wonder,” said Stevie. “You were there.”

“I crashed it? So technically, I broke the theme.”

“I feel like this is why we stopped hanging out.”

“Maybe if you want to _come by the store_ , which I’ve noticed you have never done, even though you were the one who _pressured me_ to take it over, we could hang out again.”

“By ‘come by the store,’ do you mean ‘help out at your store’?”

“Well, if you were there, it wouldn’t hurt for you to help out,” said David. 

“Because that’s exactly what I want to do on my day off.”

“Or maybe you just want to see me? Because you miss me.”

“Miss you? Did anyone say anything about missing you?”

David’s lips pulled in, because he had missed her. She had missed him too, or she wouldn’t have spent the last three minutes making very pointed insinuations about not having seen him recently. “I’ll take you to breakfast,” he said, realization of affection making him feel very magnanimous.

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” said David. “You’re helping me stock shelves.”

“I never said I would help.”

“When’s your next day off?”

“Tuesday,” said Stevie.

“I’ll see you at the café at ten.”

“Don’t you want to get started working by ten?”

“Byyyye!” David said.

*

Stevie liked Patrick. She liked him a lot. That was a problem David should have nipped right in the bud.

Like Alexis, Stevie thought there was something going on with Patrick and David. Unlike Alexis, Stevie wasn’t particularly adept at knowing those sorts of things about people. Also unlike Alexis, Stevie had never quizzed him about someone before; Stevie had never said, “I like this for you,” as though she thought it could work, as though it was a reasonable, healthy thing to want. Stevie had pretty much never been sincere before, except for a few painful moments of their history both of them had agreed were better left forgotten, but she had been sincere about Patrick.

David meant what he had said to her. Patrick was his business partner. His business partner—smart and responsible and giving to a fault, and David didn’t want to ruin it. He ruined everything, pretty much, except for Rose Apothecary and Patrick, and if anything happened between them, it would ruin both.

So David had said no when Patrick had invited him to stay at his place, and he would always say no. He was good at saying no, as long as Patrick didn’t hint more strongly that he wanted David to say yes.

*

The soft opening was on a Friday.

“Are you sure?” Patrick had asked, after their debate about the hardness of the opening. “That’s your day off.”

“I literally have not had a day off in almost two months,” said David. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

Patrick just shrugged. “You have to take a day off sometime.”

“But not Friday. Saturday and Sunday, we should be open to the public,” David said, hardly believing he’d just uttered the words ‘open to the public’. “Soft opens are always on Friday. Anyone in the industry knows that.”

“The industry?”

“Yes,” David said, annoyed because Patrick was never not laughing at him.

“Whatever you say. You’re obviously the expert on _industry_.” Finishing David’s juice, Patrick went over to the computer, where he was ‘coding the merchandise,’ whatever that meant.

Meanwhile, David folded the rest of the alpaca sweaters, thinking about how to get Patrick back for that ‘sloppy mouth’ comment when Patrick said, “How many friends and family?”

“Um, a few.”

“Maybe we should make a list. I mean, do you have a lot of friends?”

“Excuse me!” David said, slamming down the sweater and regretting that it didn’t make a loud noise for emphasis.

“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Patrick said. “Here, I mean. There’s Ray. And Cindy and Luke.”

“Who are Cindy and Luke?”

“My friends?”

David scowled, because he’d never heard of Cindy and Luke. He didn’t know a lot about Patrick, actually, come to think of it, and Patrick probably knew, like, everything about him. David didn’t exactly have great filters; he talked a whole lot, and Patrick . . . listened. That was something David liked about Patrick, because David had never had anybody who listened to him, except Stevie, who said she tuned him out when he was really going off on something. 

That was okay, since he tuned out, like, basically everyone. Oh God. What if Patrick _had_ told him about Cindy and whoever, and David had tuned him out? David fussed with the sweaters, thinking that if Patrick had told him about Cindy, it must’ve been a boring story, or else why would he have stopped listening, so it made sense that he had—“What about your family?” he asked, just to stop his brain, then had another terrible realization. “Have you told me about your family?”

“No,” Patrick said, but he was smirking at him.

“Oh God,” David said, out loud this time. “You’re not—an orphan, are you? Because I’m about to start feeling really bad about that little matchgirl comment I made last week.”

“Are you, though?”

“Oh God,” David said again, horrified.

Patrick, however, was laughing at him. “My parents are alive and well, thanks for your concern.”

“They’re not coming to the opening?” David asked, before he realized he was asking when he would meet Patrick’s parents. Oh God. That meant that Patrick was going to meet _his_ parents.

“Pinewood is very far away, and unlike some people’s parents, my parents still work, and someone wants to have the opening on a Friday.”

“My dad has a job,” David said. “Sort of. And my mom is on the council.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard she’s a real workaholic.”

David made a face at him. “Pinewood? Is that even a real place?”

“We live in Schitt’s Creek.”

“I try to forget.” David fussed with the sweaters some more. “Do you have any other family? Brothers and sisters?”

“I have a sister,” said Patrick, “but I don’t think she could come either.”

“Because it’s on a Friday?”

“She’s in Kenya.”

David head reared back. “Why is she in Kenya?”

Patrick was looking steadfastly at the computer. “Helped start a school there. She—does a lot of successful projects. For communities. Around the world.”

“Is she older than you?”

“Oh, no.” Patrick jabbed his fingers on the keyboard. “She’s younger.”

“Okay, well.” David left the sweaters, walking over to the register counter, where he put down his hands and leaned in a little toward Patrick. “You’re doing a successful project too, you know.”

Finally looking away from the computer screen, Patrick smiled at him. “I know,” was all he said, but it sent a zing of heat all the way from David’s neck to tailbone, and he should not have gotten this close to Patrick. 

David could smell Old Spice, and he looked down. “We could do the launch a different day.”

“But soft openings are always on Fridays,” Patrick said innocently. “Everyone in the industry knows that.”

“But we could do it a different day,” David said loudly. Looking down at the counter again, David lowered his voice. “If you want your parents to come.”

“It’s okay,” said Patrick.

“I _know_ it’s okay,” David said, loud again. “But—if you want them to. I’m sure—I’m sure they would be proud of you. No matter what your sister was doing in Kenya. Or whatever.”

The silence was so deafening that David felt sure he did not want to see the look on Patrick’s face. He did not want to see the look on Patrick’s face, except he _really_ wanted to see the look on Patrick’s face, and when David looked up it was worse than he expected, because Patrick was barely smiling at all. Just that soft, tender look, and David couldn’t bear it.

He couldn’t bear it; if Patrick had even given him the smallest hint that he was gay, David probably would’ve begged Patrick to fuck him over the counter immediately—so it was good, then, that Patrick had never given him the smallest hint, because dirty register-counter sex would have ruined every single thing that was nice about this moment. Probably. No, it would definitely have ruined it. David was really, really filthy, and Patrick was not. Patrick was the opposite; he was clean. He was so clean.

“That was really sweet,” Patrick said finally. “It’s almost like you were listening to me, which would be new.”

“I listen,” said David, offended and lying.

“Oh,” said Patrick. “So you remember Cindy and Luke?”

“Yes.” David ground his teeth. “They’re—your friends.”

Patrick was laughing at him again.

“Do you want to move the launch date, or not?” David demanded, very relieved that Patrick had broken the tension, despite the fact that David was still kind of thinking about getting fucked. Wow. He—really needed to get laid.

“No, you’re right.”

“About what?”

Patrick’s brows shot up. “What was that, about ‘listening’? The launch date. You’re right about the launch date. Friday works best, and I’m not even sure my parents would make that long of a drive, even if it were on a different day.”

David was sensing a whole _thing_ , here, with Patrick and his parents and his sister, except that Patrick was uncomfortable talking about it—which, David understood uncomfortable. Everything about David’s own parents and own sister made him uncomfortable, but he still _talked_ about it. “Have you asked them?” David heard himself ask.

“No, I—don’t need to do that. Let’s launch on Friday.”

Patrick wasn’t smiling at all, but not in the good way, focused instead on punching things into the keyboard.

“It’s okay to ask for things you want,” David said.

Patrick began to go pink.

Only after that did David realize how soft his voice had been, and that he was still leaning over the register counter toward Patrick. The blush dusted Patrick’s cheeks and the bridge of his nose.

Feeling his own face change color, David stood straighter. “My psychiatrist told me that. So I asked her to double my Xanax. Because I . . . wanted that.”

Patrick looked too pink to smile like David had hoped he would. “I’m . . . going to go check on these records,” Patrick said, grabbing the file folder he’d been using for reference, then disappearing into the back.

Well, fuck. David looked at the doorway to the stockroom and wondering what he’d fucked up now, because he was currently imagining that what Patrick wanted and wasn’t asking for was _him_ , and that was another problem his psychiatrist had talked to him about. “It’s not always about you,” she had told him, except each person was at the center of their own life, so David didn’t get that, really. But Patrick wasn’t always about him, because Patrick had his own life. He had his parents and his sister, and it was obviously some kind of complicated issue.

And anyway, if this was about David, he should be glad that Patrick wasn’t taking his advice, because if this was about David, and Patrick had asked for what he wanted, David would definitely have said yes. He would have said yes, and they were supposed to be business partners. So . . . Patrick could check records in the stockroom, and David would fold the alpaca sweaters, and stop thinking about what he wanted at all.

*

The soft launch went very well, and David worked Saturday as well.

“It’s the second day of the business I literally birthed to this world,” David said, when Patrick commented on this.

“ _Literally_ birthed?” Patrick said.

“Okay, this?” David said, waving his hands around at the store. “ _Hours_ of labor. I am a new mother, Patrick, and unlike _some_ mothers, I pay attention to my children.”

“I thought your mother was very nice.”

“You are literally the first person who has ever said that.” David had introduced Patrick to his parents at the opening. He hadn’t really been able to avoid it.

“I think someone maybe needs to look up the word ‘literally’.”

“No, that time the use was accurate.”

“Oh,” Patrick said, smirking at him. “Okay.”

They stopped to deal with some customers, then came back to the conversation around half an hour later.

“You do remember Sunday and Monday are my days off,” Patrick said. “So you’ll have to come in those days too.”

David lifted his chin. “It’s a statistic in western families that fathers are generally less attentive.”

“Did you just call me the father of our business?”

“. . . Yes?” David said, very reluctantly, as he was only just realizing how intimate this metaphor was. Also, gross. Also, unpleasantly gendered.

“Okay, I’m going to quote your sister on this.”

David waited, but Patrick didn’t say anything. “Yes?”

“David,” Patrick said. “Ew.”

Somewhere on a mental scoreboard, Patrick had just earned a point for being hilarious, but David didn’t want Patrick to know about it, and oh thank God, there were customers. David had just sort of been standing there trying not to smile, so this was a good distraction, and they dealt with the customers again for an hour or two.

“I thought maybe I’d take off Wednesday and Thursday,” David said, when everyone else was gone, “since you’re working those days anyway.”

“Does that mean you’re coming in Monday?”

“My baby would be three days old,” said David. “I’m not going to leave her.”

“It’s a her now?”

“The way she identifies is up to her.”

Patrick blushed, which hadn’t actually been David’s intent. This blush was very interesting, but then more customers came in, so David couldn’t push it further, and by the time the customers left, Patrick seemed to have recovered.

“If you take Wednesday and Thursday off, you’d have a four-day-weekend,” he pointed out.

“Even entrepreneurs need a break sometime, Patrick.” 

“Yeah, don’t mind me. I’ll just be here, slaving away.”

“Whatever. You have Sunday-Monday off.”

“I won’t be accused of being a deadbeat dad.”

“Okay,” David said, waving his arms. “Can we just end that metaphor forever and never speak about it again? It’s disgusting.”

“Did you just call our child disgusting?”

“Okay,” David said, as the door opened and another customer came in. “You deal with that; I have to go throw up.”

Patrick came in on Sunday and Monday, while David came in late on Wednesday and Thursday.

“Hi,” Patrick said on Wednesday, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“I have to spritz,” David said, waving around a spray bottle.

“Spritz.”

“I had a dream about it. The organic vegetables look sad. We want them to look fresh and inviting, so I got us this, and we should spritz. Once in the morning, probably once in the afternoon.” David demonstrated by spritzing the organic carrots in the crates at the front of the store.

“Good idea,” Patrick said, looking around the store. A few customers were browsing through the alpaca scarves. “When you’re done—spritzing, can I talk to you? In back?”

That sounded ominous, and David felt exhausted, so he sort of wanted to say no, but Patrick had a way of sounding very—in control. It was sort of bad. It would have been really bad, had Patrick ever used his powers for evil, but as it was, Patrick was pretty much the nicest person in the world, so it was just sort of bad. 

“David,” Patrick said, when David met him in the back. “You were going to take today off.”

“But I had a dream,” David said. “About spritzing.”

Patrick smiled, but his voice was serious. “Okay, the fact that you’re dreaming about the store? Probably means that you’re spending too much time at the store.”

“What?” David’s head reared back.

“I think it’s great,” Patrick said gently. “You’ve put a lot of work into this. But you said it yourself—you’ve been working every day for nearly two months. You need to take a break.”

David’s lip curled. “Okay, you were the one _haranguing_ me for taking a four-day-weekend—”

“I wasn’t haranguing you! I was teasing!”

“And it’s not like I’ve noticed _you_ taking any breaks, mister business major, ‘I worked my way through college.’”

“Oh my God,” said Patrick. “Is that what this is about?”

David’s head moved in a circle as he tried to describe with his hands just how appalling this conversation was. “Is that what _what_ is about?”

“Are you afraid I’ll work harder than you?”

“Afraid?” David was kind of becoming a bobble-head at this point, seeing as how words weren’t enough to express his displeasure. “You were the one asking whether I wanted to work my own opening—”

“I didn’t ask you whether you wanted to—”

“And questioning whether I wanted to be here for our store’s _second_ day, and criticizing my four-day-weekend—”

“I wasn’t criticizing—”

“And assigning me days of the week and reminding me of my schedule like I’m a _child_ who doesn’t know what _work_ is. Some of us aren’t like you; some of us have never had to make a living before; some of us grew up spoiled and privileged and unable to do things for themselves, so maybe—maybe _some_ of us are just trying to _prove_ that they can do it!”

Now Patrick had on one of his sad smiles, one of the sympathetic ones that made David feel as though he was being pitied; he hated those smiles. “There are customers out there. Some of us are going to go help them out, and some of us are going to wait right here until I get back.” Then Patrick touched David’s arm, with such extreme gentleness that the heat of him felt like it burned right through David’s heavy sweater, and he thought about how rarely Patrick touched him. At times Patrick seemed almost careful not to, as though something dreadful would happen if Patrick touched David, except how could Patrick know that; he couldn’t know the sorts of things that David thought about him, all those filthy things.

Then the touch was gone and so was Patrick, and David did what Patrick had told him to do, which was to stand there with humiliation crawling out of his stomach, up his throat, turning back his lips and face until he was turned inside out by it, all of his insides quivering on the outside. Fuck. David had yelled at him. He didn’t know why he’d yelled at him, when Patrick might just be the best thing in his life. And more importantly, the best thing for his business.

A receipt printed; then the bell above the door rang, letting out the customers. Patrick appeared again, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“ _You’re_ sorry,” David said, a little wetly, but he wasn’t crying.

“I didn’t know I was making you feel . . .” Patrick clenched his teeth for a moment. “I _was_ trying to remind you of your schedule, but it wasn’t because I don’t believe in you. It was because I knew you hadn’t worked like this before—”

“I worked at the Blouse Barn. Before this.”

“Yeah. I know that. In four-hour shifts. You told me.”

“And you just thought I wasn’t capable of—”

“Listen to me,” Patrick snapped, and David was instantly listening. 

Every fiber of his body was listening. Patrick hadn’t ever spoken like that to him before.

Turning away, Patrick let out a breath, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck. “I think you’re capable,” he said finally, turning back to David. “I think you’re capable of anything you set your mind to, and I know you’ve set your mind to this, and it—it kills me, that I made you think I doubted you on this. I never meant to make you feel that. Never.”

“Okay, but,” David said, “maybe you should.”

“No.”

“I mean, for real, though. I never—I never _have_ done anything like this. I thought I had, at one point; I mean, I had galleries in New York, and then I found out that my _parents_ had been buying all my patrons, and the artists who wanted to work with me, so actually, you should doubt me. You should doubt me very much.”

“Oh, I doubt you very much,” Patrick said. “I doubt your ability to meet here at nine, and call the electrician, and build an IKEA shelf ladder—”

“ _You_ read the instructions wrong.”

“—but I do not doubt your ability to make this venture succeed. Not for one second. Do you know how much I admire you?”

“Um,” David said, very faintly. It was hot in here. Was it hot in here? His sweater was too thick. “H-how much?”

“More than you can imagine.”

“Right, but— _how_ much?”

“You built all this from nothing,” Patrick said, waving his hand toward the store. “It went from a dream in your head to what we had last night.”

David thought about what they’d had last night, the way Patrick had hugged him after the launch. David had had—a bunch of dirty dreams that night that had _not_ become reality. None of them had been about spritzing.

“I’ve always wanted to do something like this,” said Patrick, “but I would never have the ingenuity or the courage. I’m not—big picture, like you. I wouldn’t ever have had an idea like this, so yeah, I admire you. I admire you a hell of a lot, and I think you can do it. I was just reminding you of your schedule so you—wouldn’t forget, not because I think you’ll fail, not because I think that you are anything less than . . .”

David felt like he itched all over, but he waited; he waited; he needed to hear how Patrick would end this sentence.

“Capable,” Patrick finally said.

“Capable,” David whispered, his heart still thumping, the room still too hot, and he went on being stupid because he was afraid of what else he might say. “Okay, but you still haven’t said how _much_ you admire me.”

Patrick smiled, a dazzling smile, so warm that David ached deep inside. “Are we good, here?”

David made himself swallow again. “It wasn’t—really you.”

“What?”

“Why I can’t stop coming here,” David made himself say. “I didn’t really think you doubted me. It was . . . um. Am I going to have to start paying you for therapy? Because this is the kind of confession that—at least three of them—said I was paying them for.”

Patrick smiled. “Spit it out.”

“I’m—not very good at sticking with things. I mean, usually because they sleep with my agent or leave me stranded in Sao Paolo or um, use me as a drug mule, but what I mean is—I’m not very consistent, and I haven’t ever worked really hard at anything, so it was me, that doubted me. I mean, I doubted myself, and I want to prove to myself that I can do it. So. It wasn’t you.”

“Okay,” said Patrick. “But I want you to have a day off.”

“And I want that for me too,” David said, “but if I’m not here, I’d spend all day worrying about it, and—I don’t actually think it’s the best thing. For me. Right now.” David took a breath. “I don’t think being away from here is the best thing for me right now.”

Patrick’s mouth fell open, his surprise making him seem for a moment very vulnerable. His hand came up, as though to touch David’s arm again, but it stopped, then fell back to his side. Then Patrick swallowed, then smiled, locking all of it away, and he said, “It’s because you don’t want to sit at that motel eating cheesecake, isn’t it.”

David winced. “Today it was brownies? I switch it up.”

“Do you want a variable schedule?”

David’s lip curled. “That’s some kind of technical term; I don’t . . . ?”

Patrick laughed at him. “You can just—choose your schedule.”

“So . . . I get Saturday and Sunday off?”

“Nope.” Patrick shook his head, but he was still laughing at him. “I still need my two days off. The same two days. I know from experience—I work better with a schedule. I’m a planner.”

“Color me shocked!”

“But you don’t. That’s okay. Come in when you feel like it; don’t come in when you don’t feel like it—”

“So not Saturday and Sunday?”

“—as long as you’re sure to cover the two days I’m not here, which are Sunday and Monday.”

David ground his teeth together, thinking about that. “Yeah. Yeah—that can work. Um. But can we go back to how much you admire me?”

“You know what doesn’t work about this schedule, though?”

David waited, but Patrick just smirked. “What?” David finally demanded.

“When _both_ of us are in, yet _both_ of us are in the stockroom. Kind of defeats the point.”

“It’s my weekend,” David said archly. “I just came into spritz.”

Smiling and shaking his head, Patrick looked so hopelessly affectionate for a moment that David thought that Alexis and Stevie might have a point, but then Patrick shook his head and said, “And here I was, looking forward to a whole day without you,” and walked back out onto the floor.

“You admire me!” David called after him, but there were customers on the floor, which saved Patrick from having to formulate a reply.

David looked around at the stockroom, which was really more of a stock closet, and still a little untidy from the launch. It needed to function as a break space as well as storage area, because they had to have somewhere to eat, but there were boxes half unloaded on the narrow work counter under the window and stacked messily on the floor. He and Patrick had barely been able to both fit in here, but with careful reorganization, they could at least have a clear work counter, possibly for an espresso machine, though David could only do so much on Patrick’s stingy budget.

Moving aside some of the boxes, David got to work.

*

Patrick asked David to a birthday celebration, which was terrifying. They’d been to Café Tropical quite a few times together before, because it was convenient, but this time, Patrick had set a time, a late time, like time enough for them to each go home and—do things, before going to dinner. It was not a work-adjacent dinner like other meals they had had, and David pictured himself alone at Café Tropical with Patrick, then panicked.

“I didn’t know you were having a ‘birthday celebration’,” Stevie said, in her _I am suspicious of you, which is hilarious_ voice. “How come you didn’t tell me you were having a ‘birthday celebration’?”

“Um, because it sort of came together today,” David told her.

“’Came together’?” Stevie asked brightly.

“Look,” David said. “Are you coming, or not?”

“I don’t know. I might have to move some things around on my calendar.”

“So, I’ll see you at Café Tropical at eight!” David hung up before she could say anything else, because if he gave Stevie a choice about it she might not show just to dick around with him, but if he _didn’t_ give her a choice she wouldn’t think it was as funny, and she would come. Great! So now it was Patrick and Stevie and him for his birthday, and he wouldn’t have to be alone at dinner with Patrick, and he was definitely not thinking about why that would be awful; he definitely wasn’t.

*

Stevie thought it was a date.

Stevie was actually so convinced that it was a date that she left five minutes after she got there, leaving David and Patrick alone to toast fried mozzarella sticks, and the problem was that Stevie was right. She was really, really right, and now that David was alone with Patrick on an _actual_ date, David really needed to ask something that would get Patrick talking for long enough for David to process this.

“So,” David said, opening his menu again. “Tell me about these birthdays you’ve had. They sound complicated.”

Patrick did start talking, and David only felt slightly guilty for not listening, because if he had known this was a date, he could have prepared for this. He would have dressed nicer, for one thing, and he would have smelled nicer, for another, and he _definitely_ would have worn nicer underwear, and—and he would still have not been prepared for this. There was actually no way to prepare for this. He would have spent six hours feeling like he was going to throw up, whining to Alexis about wanting to cancel, working himself into a nervous wreck until he showed up for his birthday celebration with red-rimmed eyes and high on expired meds. He would not have been prepared, but still, Patrick could have at least given him a _hint_ that this was a date.

David looked up at Patrick, who was still talking—his big brown eyes and his perfect mouth—and thought that possibly Patrick had given him hints. Lots of hints. _I admire you_ , and that hug after the launch, and all of that flirting—so much fucking flirting, even the way Patrick had dressed up tonight. Okay, so there had been a lot of hints, but Patrick hadn’t _said_ anything. He’d never said anything concrete, never done anything concrete, and—why hadn’t he just said something? David would have given it up for him immediately. Fuck business partners.

David looked at Patrick some more—Patrick’s achingly conservative dorky blazer, his achingly straight haircut, that stupid four o’clock shadow he carefully kept, possibly because he’d look too baby-faced without it. He looked better than Target, tonight, and even less like someone David would have dreamed of wanting—so very carefully dressed “nice,” like a corporate middleman in a stock photo. _I’m a planner,_ Patrick had said, and David realized that Patrick was afraid. Patrick had been too nervous to say it was a date. He’d been nervous when Stevie had wanted David to open his gift, because he had known that it would show what he wanted, and Patrick didn’t ask for what he wanted. Patrick was nervous even now. 

Patrick had changed the course of his whole life to invest in a retail startup that might fail, but he’d been afraid to ask a guy he liked on a date. The idea opened up something incredibly tender inside of David, blown into his heart like a hot glass, and he wanted to be gentle. For the first time in his life, he desperately wanted to be gentle, and it made him want Patrick even more.

“—and when I began to go into labor with the alien baby, I saw these lights in the sky, and I knew that the mothership had come for the—”

“Alien baby?”

“I have literally been talking about it for the last five minutes,” Patrick said.

“Right,” said David. “But this menu is very distracting? It’s still extremely large.”

“You could at least learn to fake that you’re listening.”

David tilted his head, narrowing his eyes. “But do you really want me to?”

A smile came over Patrick’s face, as though he found the very fact that David was a prick hopelessly endearing, and David wondered that he hadn’t seen it before. It seemed obvious, now.

“We should share something else,” David announced. “I couldn’t eat another whole entrée, after those _scrumptious_ mozzarella—things, so we should just get something else and split it.”

“I could suggest something,” Patrick said, “but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t listen.”

“Sorry, did you say something? I feel like celebrating. Let’s get a BLT.” Closing his menu, David set it aside, putting his elbows on the table, leaning in toward Patrick. “About that alien baby.”

Patrick’s brows rose incredulously. “ _Now_ you’re going to listen?”

“I told you; I was distracted. Now I’m all yours.”

Patrick immediately flushed, but rather easily, he said, “I don’t want that kind of responsibility.”

“You were the one who took me on as a business partner.”

“I don’t know; I heard from somewhere that you hired me.”

David’s lips pursed, or else he was just going to sit there and grin at him. 

“We’re going to split a BLT,” Patrick told Twyla, when she came to the table. “Could you put it on two different plates?”

“Oh,” David said, “we can share a plate.”

“I literally can’t,” Patrick told Twyla earnestly. He gestured at David. “He has a sloppy mouth.”

David’s mouth fell open in shock but also delight, while Twyla just looked at him with a bit of a worried expression. “Is that like, a condition?”

“Yes,” Patrick said earnestly. “It’s very serious.”

“It’s not contagious,” David told Twyla. “Patrick just has boundary issues? It makes him uncomfortable to share a meal, because I’m his boss.”

“He’s not my boss,” Patrick told her.

“So,” Twyla said, looking between them. “I’ll get that BLT started for you?”

“And we’re having wine.” David looked at Patrick. “I think we’ll have red.”

“You’ll have red.” Patrick looked back up at Twyla. “I’ll have a Chardonnay.”

“The cab, please,” David said, holding out the menus to Twyla, who took them and disappeared.

“Do you think you’re taking this ‘boss’ thing a little too far?” Patrick asked.

“Don’t you think you’re taking this ‘sloppy mouth’ thing a little too far?”

“I mean, but it’s true.”

“What’s sloppy about it? Come on. Tell me.” David licked his lips.

It happened—only for a fraction of a second, but it happened; Patrick’s eyes flicked down to David’s mouth and immediately darted away, and Stevie was right; Stevie was right; Stevie was right. David’s heart ratcheted up to double-time, and Patrick made a joke as though it hadn’t happened, but it had. It really had. “Ninety percent of the things that come out of it, for one thing,” Patrick said.

“What about the other ten percent of things that come out of it?”

“I don’t know,” said Patrick. “I assume those are the times you’re talking to other people. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

“You think ninety percent of the things I say are to you?”

“I didn’t think anyone else would put up with you.”

David sucked in a breath, desperately trying not to look impressed, because Patrick was almost too quick to keep up with. “You do know it’s my birthday, right? You’re supposed to be nice to me.”

“If you had listened to my story, you would know that that is not my experience of birthdays.”

“People weren’t nice to you on your birthday? Was that between the third or the eighth party they threw for you?”

Patrick did nothing to hide the fact that he was impressed. He just sat there, smiling at him, looking as though he had no idea just how fond his smile really was, and David thought he might melt. This guy was going to melt him, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care. He would die melted; he didn’t care.

Twyla came with their drinks, leaving again after saying their BLT was coming right up, and Patrick held up his glass. “I propose a toast,” he said, and David pressed his lips together to keep from looking as though he wanted Patrick to say something sweet, while also desperately hoping that Patrick would say something sweet. “To the only birthday party you’ll have this year, and the only friend who can stand you.”

“You want to toast to yourself?”

“I’d toast to Stevie, too, but she ditched.” Still holding up his glass, Patrick added in an undertone, “Because she couldn’t stand you.”

David looked disdainfully at Patrick’s raised glass. “I’m not toasting to that.”

“Suit yourself,” Patrick said, then drank the wine.

David watched him do it, the pale line of Patrick’s throat undulating as he swallowed. When Patrick put down the glass, he said, “Did you want to make a different toast?”

“Yes,” David said, raising his own glass. “To our business relationship.”

Patrick looked caught off-guard, a moment of vulnerability flashing across his face before he smiled, picked up his glass again, and clinked it against David’s. Patrick didn’t want to be just business partners, was what that vulnerability had meant. He definitely didn’t want to be just business partners. They both drank, then the BLT came on two separate plates, which defeated the point of sharing, in David’s opinion. He had been planning on letting his hand occasionally brush Patrick’s, but oh well, and also BLTs were delicious.

“Do you want to hear about one of my birthdays?” David asked, arranging the sandwich to his liking.

“What are you doing?”

“What?” David asked, because Patrick was looking at him, appalled.

“You just took off the tomato and most of the lettuce.”

“So?”

“Now it’s just a B.”

“My mouth would get sloppy otherwise. Besides, it’s my birthday; I don’t have to eat vegetables.”

“It’s literally lettuce and tomato.”

“What’s your point?” David asked, although actually this might be the most disgusting meal he had ever had, if you added the mozzarella sticks to the cab. But bacon. On toast. With mayonnaise. It was great. “Besides, I’m not the one who’s usually fussy with my food.”

“What?”

“You always fuss,” David said, taking a bite of his sandwich. When he was done chewing and Patrick was still looking at him with incredulity, he explained, “You don’t like anything sticking out, so you take the lettuce off and put it back in, and you like everything spread evenly, so sometimes you respread it, even when it’s been spread—and you use the lettuce to do it, which, gross.”

David had been flirting earlier, but really he had only talked about Patrick being a fussy eater to get back some of his own. Now, however, Patrick was looking at him with that smile, that soft warm tremendously fond smile, as though David had said something romantic, when David actually really did think it was kind of gross.

Patrick didn’t say anything though, so David told him about the time he had been nine and his parents had thrown him a big party, except that his parents hadn’t really thrown it for him so much as hired someone to plan it so that they wouldn’t have to do anything about it. There had been clowns and ponies involved, and all David remembered was crying so hard he threw up, except that his mother had later informed him he had thrown up on Bruce Willis.

Patrick smiled and laughed and teased him mercilessly throughout this story, and the delicate feeling in David’s chest stayed there, like something careful and kind. Later, in Patrick’s car, David kissed him, and it was the start of something entirely new.

*

Patrick had thanked him and said he’d never kissed a guy, but he had wanted to. He had wanted to kiss David, and out of all the possible reasons Patrick had asked him on a date without actually calling it a date, none of which David had dreamed up yet because he hadn’t had time to work himself into a dark pit of anxiety, David probably would’ve dreamed up that reason last.

David had been someone’s first time with a guy more than once, but that had always been about sex— _I want to try it_ , or _I can’t seem to keep my hands off you even though I’m married_. It hadn’t been about kissing, or anyone _thanking_ him, saying softly, _can we talk about this tomorrow?_ Patrick had asked him on a date and dressed up and got him a present; Patrick had wanted to kiss him and had been afraid he’d be too scared to do it, but he’d _wanted_ to. 

He’d wanted to, and David’s mind kept getting stuck on that because he was very, very used to people taking what they wanted from him. He was used to letting them take it—giving it to them, giving them everything, even things he didn’t want to give, because he so desperately wanted to be wanted that he often didn’t think very hard about leaving anything for himself. Or so his therapist used to say.

But tonight felt like Patrick had given him something, a soft living tender thing that David had to keep warm and safe inside of him, something that David had to take care of and touch gently. No one had ever given him anything like that, a piece of themselves—a piece of their desire but also their fear and vulnerability; Patrick had made himself vulnerable. He’d made himself vulnerable in a way David had made himself vulnerable back when he was very young, letting down defenses and letting people inside, and people had taken advantage of David, but no one would take advantage of Patrick. 

No one, because the person Patrick had let inside was David, and David could do this. He could do this right. He could be good for Patrick, better than he had been for anyone else. He could be patient and gentle and slow, because he could understand that that was what this required; he could make it about something other than sex. He could make it about dates and kisses and _I admire you_ ; he could make it about making sure that Patrick got what he needed, which wasn’t what David’s therapist had told him to do at all.

 _It’s not about what they want,_ she had said. _It’s about what you want, what you need for yourself. It’s okay to make decisions in a relationship,_ she had said; _it’s okay to ask for what you want. It’s okay to take the lead._

But then she’d turn around and tell him he was selfish, and the world was not about him; he needed to stop making everything about him. Which was it, Doctor Chodorow, because it wasn’t like you could do both at the same time, and he wanted to do the right thing here, for once; Patrick deserved the right thing.

Strangely, these contradictions didn’t bother him as much as they once might have, because David kept remembering his lips on Patrick and the way that Patrick had looked—tense and determined and grateful and serious and _glad_ ; he had looked glad. Patrick joked around a lot, David was discovering, in order to protect himself, but he’d let down all of those walls after that kiss, and it had been perfect. It had been a perfect moment, and David had never had one of those before.

David was glad too.

Dinner with Patrick had been the best first date he’d ever had. David couldn’t wait until tomorrow.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Wild and Wired](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396404) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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